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Governing Poverty: Compulsory Income Management and Crime in Australia

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Abstract

Welfare reforms have swept across most liberal-democratic nations over recent decades, carried by a deep neoliberal faith in market rationality and an intensive focus on the individual as a key site of disciplinary intervention. These reforms have been accompanied by discourses within which welfare, deviance and crime are interwoven tightly. Australia’s Income Management (IM) policies, which “quarantine” a portion of welfare income as a means of behavioral conditionality, provide an example of welfare policy that has been promoted as a way of reducing crime. In this article, we interrogate these claims. We find little support for the policy logic linking IM and crime, and we demonstrate that there is no clear evidence that IM has reduced crime. Instead, we argue that the overwhelming focus of IM on poor and racialized subjects serves to socially construct crime as a metaphor for justifying the harmful “double punitive regulation” of the state. This sees the state’s left hand (i.e., social functions, including workfare) and right hand (i.e., punitive functions, including prisonfare) work together to turn poor (and mainly Indigenous) populations into marketized subjects, while punishing those who resist, through a range of governing techniques.

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Notes

  1. For a more detailed discussion about behavioral conditionality under IM, see Bielefeld (2014b).

  2. The Australian Government refers to the CDC as “cashless welfare” rather than IM. Because both cards attach conditions to and thus manage the expenditure of welfare income, however, we refer to them here collectively as “IM.”

  3. While we adopt the term “quarantine” in this article to reflect political discourses, we also later discuss its peculiarity.

  4. “Welfare dependency” has been widely critiqued as a pejorative term that shifts attention away from structural causes of poverty and onto the ostensible individual failings of the poor (Mendes 2017). It is, however, used here because it is frequently employed by policymakers in discourses around IM.

  5. Some studies combine self-report data with official crime data as a means of uncovering less visible crime (e.g., Gillman et al. 2014; Pare and Felson 2014). These data sources still do not, however, address the possibility of an indirect link between poverty and crime, and many studies still focus disproportionately on “street crime” (e.g., Pare and Felson 2014).

  6. The term, “other essentials,” was not defined at this point, though it has subsequently been used to refer to basic foods (including “fresh fruit and vegetables” (Macklin and Snowdon 2009: 1)) and other items needed to care for children and families, such as childcare, clothing, education, health-related products, housing, job training, public transport, and “the acquisition, repair, maintenance or operation of motor vehicles (used wholly or partly for purposes in connection with any of the above needs)” (Buckmaster, Ey and Klapdor 2012: 9).

  7. This built on an earlier IM proposal by Brough (2006) and was also likely modeled on food stamps (Board of Inquiry 2007), which had long been used as part of the United States government’s “War on Poverty” (Haveman et al. 2015).

  8. Cape York IM was also extended to the remote Indigenous community of Doomadgee on the Gulf of Carpentaria (northwestern Queensland) in April 2016 (Scott et al. 2018).

  9. For a critique of the use of the term “vulnerability” under IM, see Bielefeld (2014a).

  10. This has raised concerns about commercial interests in the CDC trials (see Nehme 2018).

  11. “Humbugging” refers to unrelenting requests for money or alcohol, generally without the expectation of exchange or reciprocity (Altman 2011).

  12. Findings about drug use are, however, more mixed (e.g., Grant and Dawson 1996; Schmidt and McCarty 2000).

  13. “Welfare households” refers to those households where the main income source was government pensions and allowances (ABS 2017).

  14. These reflect long-term, national trends that precede the introduction of IM.

  15. IM policy had remained consistent in this community over the time period covered by these two statements.

  16. These comparisons are not reproduced here for the purpose of brevity but can be obtained by contacting the corresponding author.

  17. This is also noted by Deloitte Access Economics (2014a, b: 191), who intended to evaluate crime in relation to PBIM, but abandoned the strategy due to “lack of precision.”

  18. And, similar to IM, it was typically police who were charged with being the “protectors” of these carceral colonial spaces, which involved “management” and reappropriation of the waged incomes of those forced to live within them (see, e.g., Bielefeld 2014a; Campbell 2015).

  19. Of course, labeling theory scholars have argued for different mechanisms (Barmaki 2019), and modified labeling theory also suggests that individuals respond in different ways to the same label (Link et al. 1989).

  20. Wacquant (2014: 273) describes the Centaur state as being “liberal at the top and punitive at the bottom.”

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this article. An earlier iteration of the paper was also presented by the first author at the 2019 Australian Social Policy Conference; the author would like to thank the audience members for their valuable feedback on this presentation, which also helped to shape the published version of this paper. Finally, we acknowledge that this research was undertaken as part of an Australian Research Council funded project (#DP180101252) entitled Conditional welfare: a comparative case study of income management policies. Further information about the project can be found at the project website: https://www.incomemanagementstudy.com

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Zoe Staines, Greg Marston & Michelle Peterie

  2. Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

    Shelley Bielefeld

  3. School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Louise Humpage

  4. Department of Social Work, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Philip Mendes

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  1. Zoe Staines
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Staines, Z., Marston, G., Bielefeld, S. et al. Governing Poverty: Compulsory Income Management and Crime in Australia. Crit Crim 29, 745–761 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-020-09532-2

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